


The Gift

by hellkitty



Category: RoboCop (2014), RoboCop - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, M/M, Post canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 11:23:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1224424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wooo boy, breaking in a shiny new fandom with angst. Tell me you're surprised. I know you are.<br/>Hey, it was either this or porn. <s>Which I will probably write later to the secondhand embarrassment of all</s>. </p><p>So, yeah, spoilers for 2014 movie canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gift

_You made me what I am -- "_ The Gift", Five.Bolt.Main

 

Alex checked the time for about the seventh time in a minute. Fifty four seconds, his chrono automatically corrected. She was late. Clara was late.

He shifted on his feet, trying to mask agitation, knowing Norton was watching him. At least, watching his brain activity. Which was almost the same as staring at him, only somehow more disconcerting, more intimate.

“It’s all right, Alex,” Norton said, with his calming, quiet voice. “Maybe she just hit some traffic.”

That distracted him for about another thirteen seconds, as he accessed the CC network, covering the route between his old home and here. No sign, no trace. And no hits on any car accidents in the area, either. “She didn’t hit traffic.”

“Alex.” Norton looked up from his monitor, pushing his glasses up with one finger. And then stopping, because he didn’t know what to say, either. There was no car in the driveway, no car in the precinct parking lot, no sign of life. She wasn’t coming. It was a truth that loomed larger than a shadow between them. Norton faltered, looking away for a second. “Maybe she just…needs a break. This has been very hard on her.”

Needs a break. Alex felt a flare of anger, entirely childish, at the thought. She could get a break, if she wanted to. She could walk or drive away and have a normal life, disappear into a crowd: go to the mall, buy groceries, get her hair done, any of a million things of an ordinary, normal life that was forever beyond Alex’s reach. He quashed the anger, knowing Norton must have seen the spike of catecholamines, the cascade of adrenaline and noradrenaline just beginning to hit Alex’s systems, making his hand twitch, his breath rasp through his larynx.

“She could have told me.” Simple truth. He wasn’t—or at least he didn’t used to be—a complicated man.

“Maybe she didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” Norton knew while he was saying it how weak it was. Because it was obvious that Alex’s feelings were hurt. A lot. He could see evidence of Alex’s agitation spilling across the monitor.

“She could have told me,” he repeated, and the words tasted the same, bitter and dry like straight hydrogen, and rattled an empty place in his chest. It would still have hurt, but it would have hurt less, missing the bronchitis-burn of betrayal.

“You’re not going to look for her?” Norton seemed surprised, moreso when Alex shook his head.

“No.” He could, if he wanted, and they both knew it: he could rerack surveillance cams, stoplight cameras, find out when she left, and where. He didn’t. He wasn’t even tempted. What was the point of power if you couldn’t use it to get what you wanted? And what he wanted wasn’t to own her, wasn’t to keep her against her will. He wanted Clara happy. And the thought that his existence, that coming to see him hurt her; that, for all he knew, she had nightmares about signing the papers, turning him into this; made him feel selfish and small and greedy. If she wanted to leave like this, it was the least he could do to let her go.

The least he could do for both of them.

Norton’s eyes flicked back to his screen, and Alex could see a flare of some other neurochemical on display reflected on Norton's eyeglasses. They’d taught him the basics, dopamine and adrenaline, the chemicals of basic emotion. But who knew what this was? They’d never gone over what heartbreak looked like, what neurotransmitter spelled despair. “Alex, I can help, if you want me to.”

“How.”

“I can diminish—“

It took a second—those two point four seconds—for Alex to work out what Norton was offering: to cut his dopamine levels until he couldn’t feel a thing, or jack his oxytocin up until he felt happy, relaxed, content, almost post coital.

Both felt like betrayal. “No.” She wanted it this way, and whether or not she believed it would hurt, whether or not she really believed he would feel it or not was almost immaterial. And maybe that was it, she honestly thought he was not a human, without real emotions. Maybe she really thought he was a thing, and wasn’t he? He was less than half a man. He'd never calculated how much less, but...a lot. He was a hand, a face, a mind, and even those were tampered with, impure. His emotions could be spun out through chemicals, injections, counteragents, the effect almost immediate, and exquisitely calibrated. Did that make him less a man?

Did that make him less a human?

Maybe she didn’t want it to hurt, after all, but _he_ did. He wanted it to hurt, to sear into his memory. To remind himself that he _could_ feel, he could hurt.

He spun on one heel, the movement fluid, as always, the gimbals keeping his balance with their almost preternatural, mechanical grace, moving to the door.

“Where are you going?”

Alex stopped, half-turning his head, just over his shoulder, a priority-list of warrants blooming across his HUD. “To work. That’s what you made me for.”

And he knew his words hurt Norton, as well, the way he flinched, like Alex had whipped him across the face. It shouldn’t have felt good, to lash out, but it reminded him that he was still, somehow, part of the human race.

Just maybe the wrong part.

**Author's Note:**

> * I really wrestled with the subject here, because it's awfully close to fridging for me, but I can tell from personal experience that, alas, relationships change, and sometimes do break down, after major changes like this. Plus I think Clara must, at some point, have felt guilty about her decision. 
> 
> * The neurochemistry is probably wrong. I was not an A student in Org Chem, okay? And, sure, I could have looked it up, but if Blomkamp can't look up what a compound fracture is for his multimillion dollar Elysium, and we have Alex here in canon with 'fourth degree burns' with nowhere near that amount of visible eschar, I ain't gonna be the one to raise the bar of accuracy, yo. 
> 
> ~~Did I just say 'yo', in public?~~
> 
> * Trivia that might elucidate his last comment: 'robot' was coined in Karel Capek's 1920 Czech play "R.U.R." and is derived, obviously, from a Czech word, meaning 'worker'. 
> 
> * Title and epigraph based on [ The Gift by Five.Bolt.Main](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqRxuFzbdbU).


End file.
